Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved Hyenas. Shot in black & white, HAIRAT is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relationship between man and wild beast.

Jessica Beshir is a Mexican Ethiopian writer and director. She made her directorial debut with her short film HAIRAT, which premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and has won several awards. Her second short film He Who Dances on Wood premiered at the 2017 Hot Docs Film festival. She recently directed the short film Heroin, which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film festival. She is currently developing her first feature film.

Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera — John Bresland

Adapted from David Trinidad’s 2013 book, Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, the film situates Trinidad’s poems within appropriated clips of the prime-time soap that ran on ABC from 1964 to 1969. Voiced by David Trinidad and featuring original music by Deerhoof guitarist, John Dieterich, and Jeremy Barnes.

John Bresland works in film, radio and print. His work has been anthologized in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time as well as The Fourth Genre, an anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction. His video essay, Mangoes, was recently installed at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. He teaches creative writing and media arts at Northwestern University.

Halimuhfack — Christopher Harris

A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. By design, nothing in this film is authentic except the source audio. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women recycled from an educational film become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.

Christopher Harris has exhibited his films at MICROSCOPE Gallery in Brooklyn, Autograph ABP in London, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Artists' Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, as well as in festivals including Ann Arbor, Rotterdam, VIENNALE-Vienna, and Edinburgh. Harris is the recipient of a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship. He is the Head of Film and Video Production in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa.

Self(ie;) & FEVER — Laura Iancu

Self(ie;) is a short film about the hallucinatory effect of over-articulating one’s image through reappointing the functionality of technologies solely designed to produce social capital and a comforting sense of individuality.

Fever is an arrayed combustion of sparkly ornaments, insects and animals – a hot delirium of decomposition by excess. Soundtrack composed, recorded, and arranged by Costin Chioreanu, twilight13media.com.

Laura Iancu was born in Romania and raised by sheepherders. She earned a double MFA In Photography and Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. She currently teaches film production classes at Virginia Tech.

SPACY — Takashi Ito

SPACY consists of 700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame according to a strict rule where movements go from rectilinear motion to circular and parabola motion, then from horizontal to vertical. It is one of the most amazing films ever made.

Takashi Ito is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in Japan. He graduated from Art and Technology Department of Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983 during which he made a debut with the film SPACY in 1981. He was rather a premature virtuoso.

The Golden Bowl or Repression & Terrorists in Love — Chris Kraus

The Golden Bowl or Repression is inspired partly by the Henry James novel. Empty rooms and well kept gardens. Noted by photographer Nan Goldin for its dissections of “romance, mystification and the inability to connect.” The New York Times writes, “Ms. Kraus gives Henry James’s emotionally twisted locutions a mood of post-punk ennui.”

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of Summer of Hate, I Love Dick, and, most recently, After Kathy Acker, the first, fully authorized biography of the legendary writer.

Copy and Past — Jason Livingston

Found images and text from online matchmaking sites are anagrammed by poet Dora Malech to produce uncanny digital desires.

Jason Livingston is a award-winning mediamaker whose work has been programmed at many festivals and venues, including Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, and the Austrian Museum.

TAIL — Ye Mimi

Sometimes, you’re not sure if you’re still there, the “there” where you used to be. The speed of your instantaneous displacement is far lighter than a banana or a mask. This video is based on the first half of the poem “Tail” by the Taiwanese poet Ling Yu. Instead of being a realistic accompaniment, it’s a bizarre echo from the bottom of the soul.

Ye Mimi is a Taiwanese poet and filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Department at Dong Hwa University and the MFA Film Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through collaging her words and images, she tries to erase the border between poetry and image-making to create a new landscape.

Broken Tongue — Monica Savirón

Broken Tongue is an ode to the freedom of movement, association, and expression. It pays homage to the diaspora of the different waves of migration, and challenges the way we represent our narratives. Mainly made with images from the January 1st issues of the New York Times since its beginning in 1851 to 2013, Broken Tongue is a heartfelt tribute to avant-garde sound performer Tracie Morris and to her poem “Afrika.”

Tracie Morris is a poet who has worked extensively as a page-based writer, sound poet, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and multimedia performer. Morris is Professor and Coordinator of the MFA program in Performance and Performance Studies at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York.

Mónica Savirón is an independent curator, writer, and experimental filmmaker. Her film Answer Print (2016) had its World Premiere at the 54th New York Film Festival. Winner of the Best Film award at FRONTEIRA Film Festival in Brazil, Broken Tongue (2013) has been shown at more than fifty major festivals and art venues around the world.

Kurupuru — Florina Titz

A programmer is working on a map of the city when he discovers a glitch inside the system. Set on fixing this computer error, he travels inside the city itself only to make a radical discovery. After a poem by Nick Twemlow.

Florina Titz is a Romanian filmmaker. She directed and wrote the first Romanian queer film (TRIP, 2008), received an MFA in Film & Video Production from the University of Iowa, and is currently in post-production with Caihong City—an indie sci-fi film shot in New York and Romania.

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Screening Thursday, August 10, 4:30pm-5:00pm, on a loop (before the Canarium/Gramma Reading) in the front room of Saint George Hall:

Born in Brooklyn in 1968, Sasha Waters Freyer is a moving image artist trained in photography and the documentary tradition who makes unsentimental films about the loss of innocence, real or imagined. Her past projects have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, Big Sky, Havana, Videoex, and Ann Arbor Film Festivals; IMAGES in Toronto, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Pacific Film Archive and L.A. Film Forum, as well as the Sundance Channel and international cable and public television.

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Screening Saturday, August 12, 6:00pm-7:30pm in Marfa Public Library:

Children Who Won't Die — Nobu Yamaoka

Directed by Nobu Yamaoka and scored by composer Keiichiro Shibuya, the documentary is a meditation on the work of Japanese artist Arakawa and his efforts, with his wife and creative partner Madeline Gins, to “reverse destiny” and free humanity from the necessity of death.